Christopher D. Sessums :: Blog :: Requiring High-School Students to Take at Least One Online Course

December 13, 2005

Requiring High-School Students to Take at Least One Online Course

This article in the Chronicle of Higher Education has me concerned.

The good news is the state of Michigan sees enormous potential in elearning.

What concerns me is what the students will be enrolling in. I'm not crazy about standards but they do provide a baseline for dialogue and expectations.
So I am curious to know what students can expect of their elearning courses? Will they be primarily text driven courses, uber-correspondence courses delivered on the web? Will they be sections of cohorts with plenty of reflective and group activities? Will the courses be built on a philosophy of constructivism, connectivism, or essentialism? Who decides who teaches these courses? Are there prerequisites for the people who teach these courses or design them?

So why am I so concerned?

I guess it's because these proposed requirements that Michigan is working on apply to high school students. If we poison that well, how can we expect students to see the value of elearning?

Perhaps I am looking at this all wrong. Plenty of high school and college kids have suffered the slings and arrows of bad teaching for decades and have turned out pretty well. I guess like many educators, I am sensitive to bad teaching. And bad online ecologies have the potential to send all of the gains that have been made over the past decade in developing a new pedagogy down/up the river without a paddle.

I am also worried about the concept of efficiency. (I have just begun reading Andrew Feenberg's Questioning Technology.)
Although it is not stated explicitly in the article cited above, I believe many administrators see elearning as a way to move students through the system as quickly and efficiently as possible. This of course begs the whole question of what schools are for in the first place. However, my spidey-senses are telling me that the online courses to be offered and required in Michigan could end up being text-heavy, non-interactive, independent study courses that do not utilize the variety of social softwares available, which in turn give students a limited understanding of how the interweb can be used well in education.

Again, perhaps I am being overly pessimistic. Working for a large, public, land-grant university and having attended a garishly large, regional high school, I have seen how large-scale innovations end up watered-down facsimilies that do not live up to their promises. Let's hope there's a plan behind the headlines.

Keywords: efficiency, elearning, high school, learning, learning ecology, Michigan, teaching, technology

Posted by Christopher D. Sessums

Comments

Hi Christopher. Just a reply to your coment to my blog a week or so ago. As you will see I have removed the blog. I did this because I think it best to leave things to those who have been using the space to carry the space forward. The environment is new to me so I am still looking around, soaking it all in. I have added a photo and will soon customise my learning environment. I agree with much of what say. I have good reason to disparage parts of the education sector that I have recently been involved with. The problem is that I believe in the University system and the academe and all that, so this makes things difficult. I have also had some troubles with critical pedagogy on the home front. And we do live in different worlds, after all. There seems to be a very inflexible nature about some of the critical theory people I have come across. Others not so. Reflexivity seems to be a very contestable kind of notion in some quarters. I have found that some educators see it as entrenched in epistemology. In the smaller, more regulated learning sector in my home country, this would appear to give them the right to establish little fiefdoms all over the place, kind of like the serf system. For this reason I have moved even further into technical approaches, and combining very mundane method with a heuristic purpose (and a dose of hopefulness). While I am not really a technology person, much of what I have worked on has the objective of establishing bases for progressive knowledge and advanced technology. This is why I focus on ontology - and potentially, with epistemology, ethics and anthropology. I have been rushing things a bit in an effort to build some context. This is what I do. Because the work is ultimately aimed at logistics and technicalities, perhaps it does come across as a bit like machination, which I have to admit is part intentional. Also the content of my blogs so far has been something of a revisit, but most of it is still written very ad lib. Moving fast and thinking on my feet. Anyway, I appreciate your comments and I wonder if I were to sometime to threaten to conquer the whole world, whether there would only be one dissenter. I think that once my content is settled in I might take some time to settle in myself. I am just finishing off the final file in my markets folder, and then I will tidy up the site a little bit. Regards. Mark.

Mark Joseph Erceg on Thursday, 15 December 2005, 01:56 CET # |